Blood Queen Read online

  Well, nothing bad except that you basically jumped Gray after the adrenaline high of killing the creature.

  That snarky voice in my head mocked me, and I astutely turned my mind away from it. I was done feeling ashamed of the way Gray made me react to him; I might not understand exactly why it was that I was attracted to a vampire, but that was neither here nor there. Gray was out of my life now, beyond my reach with his pretty little wife, and there was nothing I could do about it. So I had best just stop thinking about him.

  And start thinking about this hybrid I was about to kill. My lips curled into a smirk at the thought of it, and I sped up, curving around another alley's corner, and at last the creature came into view.

  It was snarling up at a wall, as if it didn't understand that it wasn't going to be able to get through it, further confirming my belief that these creatures were unintelligent. Something in the way they'd been created, in the melding of two creatures that were never supposed to be one, had prohibited them from keeping the minds of their predecessors. Both the wolves and the vampires were highly intelligent species, but this offspring…it was dumb as a mule.

  "Hey, boy," I said, letting out a high-pitched whistle to get his attention.

  The beast stiffened then tilted its head back, scenting the air. A low growl built in its throat, and then it turned to face me.

  The look on its face was unmistakable—it knew that I was the enemy. Not prey but predator. It could smell that on me, as much as a lion would never mistake a crocodile for lunch. Both were at the top of their food chains, and neither would mess with the other without hunting mates to back them up.

  Well, that didn't prove true for me. I didn't have hunting mates, never had—except for that one time Gray and I had hunted together, and oh how glorious that had been—no, no, I wasn't going to think about that.

  Focus on the beast. You can't lose your head in the middle of this.

  The beast lunged at me with a loud roar, and I flung myself to the side, hitting the wall with my shoulder and bouncing off of it to spin about to face the beast again. This wouldn't be like the fight with the vampire when Tita had found me; I was stronger now, and I wasn't about to let this hybrid creature get the better of me.

  It came at me again with another roar, and this time I wasn't fast enough to get out of its way. Not surprising, considering that it had the speed of both supernatural entities to call upon.

  Its claws raked into my right arm, bringing forth a spout of agony that had me letting out a pain-filled scream I would have preferred to keep to myself. The sleeve of my shirt was torn, and beneath it I could easily see the bloody wounds it had inflicted upon me, angry and red and whispering of a taint that I would need to exorcise later.

  Not that I had time to think about that now. The hybrid fitted one clawed hand around my throat, its greedy yellow eyes boring into mine, and I saw the hunger within.

  It knew that I was not prey, but it would rejoice in feeding on me regardless.

  "Not so fast, fucker," I snarled, wrapping one hand around its giant forearm.

  It had made a mistake getting this close to me. It was true that blood mages could kill from a distance—that was why the vampires were so afraid of us, heedless of the idiocy that came with being afraid of healers—but with something like this, I had learned I needed the close contact to lock onto its biorhythm.

  It was too strange, too foreign to me, for me to be able to catch onto it from a distance and end its life that way. No, I had to touch it—there was no inhibiting a blood mage from finding the rhythm once we were in physical contact.

  I felt it the moment my fingers alighted on its skin, the thrum of life within the creature, and locked onto its rhythm. And then I began to chant, uttering the words of death that no sane creature would hear and stick around for. Normally, I would have used an incapacitation spell first, something to keep it in place so that it couldn't flee before I was done with it.

  But the beast was dumb, and it didn't understand.

  The moment the spell activated, boiling the creature’s blood, it let loose an agonized howl, stumbling back and away from me. It knew that I was the source of its pain, but it couldn't understand how. It was too stupid to understand the complexities of magic.

  But that was all right. I didn't need to maintain the contact to kill it.

  I amplified the spell, chanting faster, destroying its body in a more hurried fashion than I would have liked. But I couldn't take any chances. I couldn't risk it getting back up and taking another swipe at me.

  That would have been no good. This creature, more than any vampire, was capable of killing me. It was stronger, faster than any werewolf or vampire alive. Its hunger ran deeper, too, driving it to hunt in the daylight and without regard for those that saw it feed. It didn't understand the need for secrecy. It didn't fear attention being brought to it, and with good reason. If it was capable of thought, perhaps it would have known that even if we were aware of it, we wouldn't be able to do much to stop it.

  Well, except for me. The other blood mages, too, if they had taken the time to learn combat magic. They could have stopped the hybrid just as much as I could, I was sure of that, but they didn't want to. For some reason, they feared and despised hunters as much as the werewolves had feared and hated me when I had lived among them.

  They didn't seem to understand the need to be able to protect themselves any more than this creature, this hybrid, understood the need to shield itself from the eyes of those that could hurt it. In many ways, they shared that failure of logic.

  At last, the spell finished. The creature had long since fallen to the ground and was twitching as the agony had overcome its mind and fried its nerves.

  I looked down at it, my head cocked to the side, and smiled.

  Another successful kill, another notch on my belt.

  It should have left me satisfied. I waited for the rush of adrenaline, the sensation of victory coursing through my veins, but it didn't come.

  Why didn't I enjoy this kill as I had the others?

  Seven

  It was a long walk back to the blood mages’ safe house, during which I spent my time pondering the oddity of what had just happened. I could have gotten there a lot faster if I had picked up my normal running speed again, as I had when I had left the house, but I found that I wasn't so eager to get back.

  I didn't want to return to the house full of suspicious eyes and distrustful whispers. I didn't want to hurry back to be judged and found wanting, when all I had done was try to protect them. They hadn't liked me because I was a hunter, and now I had gone and done exactly what they found so despicable about me.

  I had hunted.

  Why did that have to be such a bad thing? Why couldn't they appreciate that what I was wasn't an evil but a necessity of life? Someone had to be capable of protecting the weak, or they would all die out. Maybe if the mages had accepted the concept of hunting, had learned combat magic, before the vampires had come with their collars, we wouldn't be in the mess we were in right now.

  Almost all of us had been in the dungeons beneath the vampire castle, living out a life that no one should be forced to endure, all because we hadn't learned how to protect ourselves appropriately.

  It was ironic in the extreme that the vampires had feared our ability to kill when so many of us weren't actually capable of it. Sure, they could have been capable, if they had learned, but even still, they failed to learn. Perhaps they didn't want to be the evil that the vampires feared. Perhaps they didn't want to prove them right.

  I scoffed at that thought. Who cared about “stooping to their level” when it was a matter of life and death? Now was not the time to fall back on philosophy. We should be thinking about war, not about whether it was “moral” for us to fight back against the ones that meant to imprison us for the rest of our lives.

  How could they think that it was preferable to be stuck up instead of to live?

  At the end of the day, that seemed
to be the difference between them and me. I was willing to do what it took to live, to survive, when they weren't. They stuck to a moral code that I just couldn't understand.

  They never lived in the dungeons.

  The thought comforted me somewhat. It was true: the mages I was living with now didn't know the horrors of the dungeons like I did. They had all evaded the vampires this long, so they didn't understand what it meant to grow up with guards constantly beating you, never knowing if today would be the day they decided never to feed you again, never knowing if they were finally going to visit the ultimate horror on you that you had heard them doing to the other women for so long.

  I shuddered at the thought. That was something I'd been very lucky about, if I could consider anything that happened in those cells lucky. I had never had to endure that, though I had seen the lecherous looks of some of the guards when they had looked at me. I didn't know why they hadn't acted on their basic natures, but I was damned happy about it, and I wasn't going to question the good luck I'd had on that.

  All too soon, I found myself coming back to the safe house. It felt like I hadn't had enough time away from the suspicion that awaited me inside the house, and I thought for a moment about turning around and walking the streets for a little while longer. I appreciated that they clothed and fed me, gave me a bed to sleep in, but it wore on my soul that they clearly hated me as much as they did.

  Was it so much to ask that I find one place in the world where I wasn't regarded as some kind of horrible creature? The guards in the dungeons had regarded me as a snake that had to be beaten to be kept under control, regardless of the spelled collar I had worn at the time. The werewolves had looked on me as one who would turn on them at any moment. And the vampires…well, returning to the vampires had been exactly what I would have thought. It was only when they'd thought I was a thrall that they hadn't outright hated me, and then once that guise had been destroyed, it had all been for naught.

  Now I was with people who should have understood me better than anyone else in the world—they were my people, for god's sake—and yet they looked at me just as all the others had throughout my life.

  I sighed as I walked up to the door, opened it, and stepped inside. My muscles tensed as soon as I crossed the threshold; I knew what awaited me here, and I didn't like it.

  When I looked around at the mages waiting in the living room—why were they waiting? Had they been waiting to see if I would return?

  I saw a mixture of awe and fear in their eyes, and none of them spoke. Not even Eva, though I hadn't thought anything would leave her dumbstruck enough to stop her from snapping at me. She was such a fearless old woman, but even her eyes had that same awe and fear in them.

  The tension in the room was thick, and for a moment I just stared back at them, not sure what to say or do.

  Were they going to throw me out?

  I didn't like that they feared me now. Somehow, it was worse than them hating me.

  At last, Tita spoke up. Probably she was the only one who could because she was related to me.

  "What happened?" Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, and it trembled as she spoke.

  I shrugged. "I hunted, found, and killed the beast."

  In my eyes, there was no need to dissemble or be modest; I had been blunt all my life, and I wouldn't stop that habit now.

  For some reason, my words were what was needed to break the silence in the room. As soon as I spoke, they all burst into a flurry of conversation.

  "No, that can't be possible," one of them said.

  "I saw the wounds that creature left on Isaac. No one should have been able to stand up to something that could do so much harm."

  "I've heard of blood mages who were hunters, but the stories never spoke of someone strong enough for that," another said, eyeing me with that same suspicion again. "It's not possible."

  What did he mean, that he'd heard of other blood mage hunters but that they wouldn't have been able to do what I'd done? I wasn't anything special, just a blood mage that had learned combat magic. Surely any one of the mages before me would have been able to do it if they had just bothered to learn how to protect themselves.

  "Are you calling my cousin a liar?" Tita bristled at the implication, and I felt a little better at that. At least she still trusted me. "If Nina says she killed it, then she did."

  "But it's not possible, Tita. You're letting your desperation to have kin get in the way of your ability to reason. You saw the damage that was done, so you know she couldn't possibly have stood up to that monster. Just look at her. She's got one set of claw marks on her arm. Surely if she'd fought the beast, it would have done more damage to her."

  I arched an eyebrow. "So, that's my crime? Being too fast to get cut to pieces? I told you all, I've fought the hybrids before. I know how to kill them. I know how to fight. It's not my fault you don't understand how that works."

  The man who'd been speaking against me bristled at the accusation.

  "You've polluted your nature. Don't pretend that somehow makes you better than us."

  "I learned how to defend myself!" I snapped, defensive now. "It's not my fault you don't care about your own self-preservation."

  "That's enough!" Finally Eva spoke, rising to her feet. As soon as her voice cut through the air, the others fell silent. "We will speak no more of this. I believe the girl. If any of you would have thought to spread your awareness to her, you would know she carries the scent of an abomination—she has fought that which is neither vampire nor werewolf, and she bears the mark of her fight. It is enough evidence for me to believe that she found the monster that hurt Isaac."

  There were some grumblings yet, but no one outright disagreed with her. It was very clear that Eva was the head of this little motley crew. Her word was final, no matter if anyone disagreed with it.

  "Is Isaac all right?" I asked when no one else would speak. "Were you able to heal him?"

  Eva's features softened. "He is well now, child, thanks to you. If we hadn't known what to look for in his wounds, we wouldn't have been able to heal him. It was your identification of his attacker that saved his life."

  I blushed. "Really, it was just a matter of luck. But I'm glad he's all right."

  "Mmm," Eva murmured. She looked at the other mages and then back at me. "Would you like to join us for dinner tonight, Nina?"

  My eyes widened. That hadn't happened yet. Yes, they fed me, but I wasn't welcome at the dinner table—I always ate in my room. They hadn't liked the idea of me being around them; they had just put up with my presence in the house.

  "I would love to, thank you," I whispered, unable to keep the strong emotions out of my voice.

  Was she accepting me? I almost didn't dare to hope.

  Yet my heart leaped at the thought, and tears burned at my eyes.

  Home.

  Eight

  Time is a funny thing. It ebbs and flows in a fashion that is impossible to catch hold of. When you want it to go quickly, it never will, and when you want to savor the moment, it's over all too quickly.

  Somehow, the month that passed with the blood mages was both too fast and too slow. In the beginning, it was still difficult—not everyone agreed with Eva's decision to welcome me into the fold, and I'd had to deal with a good deal of prejudice for a while. But as time had passed, so had the suspicion that they had looked at me with.

  We had fallen into something of a rhythm, and with it had come more acceptance than I had expected. When the other mages needed to leave the house for supplies or other things—they needed to get food and healing supplies, after all, and sometimes they were eager to get out of the house rather than risk getting cabin fever—I would go with them to keep them safe. The first few times, they had been very jittery about it, not wanting me walking among them. It was as if they were sheep and I was the wolf. But they had learned, after the first attack, that it wasn't them I was looking to eat.

  After that, they had become much friendlier with
me, even going so far as to invite me into conversations, to let me sit with them in the living room, to treat me like another member of the “family.”

  It was what I had always wanted, and yet I was still so nervous that it would all fall apart any moment now. I was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for them to turn around and say it was all a mean prank and that they didn't actually want me around at all.

  That hadn't happened yet, and I was trying to stop myself from thinking about it.

  In addition to my responsibilities watching over them when they left the house, I had also taken up the task of patrolling the city. I did it mostly during the day, so that I could avoid the vampires that hunted me, but there were times when I just couldn't ignore the call of the night. I had been nocturnal for so long that it was second nature to me now to rise in the night with more energy than I ever had in the day.

  It was funny. I had spent so much time hating the night, yearning for the touch of the sun on my skin, and I didn't even think about that anymore. I was happy enough belonging somewhere that I didn't think about whether I was getting my daily dose of sun, and I didn't chafe at the inherent call of the night.

  But my regular patrols had turned up more and more troubling things. I had hunted several hybrids now, and I worried that the situation was growing out of control. I didn't know where the hybrids were coming from, who was creating them, but I did know that something needed to be done about it, and soon. What, though, I didn't actually know.

  How could I stop the flow of hybrids into the city when I didn't know where they came from? And it wasn't as if I could torture one of the hybrids into telling me who their sire was; they were too dumb to give me that kind of information.

  I sighed, leaning back against the wall of the building behind me. I was sitting on a fire escape, my legs stretched out in front of me, taking a brief break during one of my nightly hunts. Nothing had turned up yet tonight, but that didn't mean it would be smooth sailing for the rest of it.